Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

Bad Church Website Design Poster #0003 – Pretentious

September 2, 2007by meandean

Nothing shouts at a potential visitor ‘your time is NOT important to us‘ than making them have to wait for a pretentious Flash intro … especially those renderings so gratuitous that they include a ‘skip intro’ link. Here’s why:

“… thereâ€™s a tendency to misuse Flash and because of space I canâ€™t go into every detail. Nevertheless, hereâ€™s a perfect example …

You have to watch a boring, soundless, twenty second flash intro with no option to skip it …

Putting a ‘Skip Intro’ button on the page. Of course, we all realize that a ‘Skip Intro’ button signifies that the content on the page is worthless.

Good Web designers only put content that must be viewed on a page. By giving them the option to skip this material, youâ€™re saying itâ€™s not worth seeing. If it isnâ€™t worth seeing, why do you have it on your site in the first place?”

Emphasis mine, but I’ve dialoged enough with Mr.Flanders to know that if anything, I haven’t emphasized the concept of worthless Flash animation enough.

Look at it this way: what would happen if you were visiting a new church for the first time, only to be halted at the door, made to wait for the ‘greeter’ to set-up and load his portable DVD player, to make you watch a video of fly-in slogans, church-speak and content the equivalent to a DIAL Soap commercial?

Yeah, any wonder why the Waffle House down the street is selling so many omelettes this morning? Probably because they don’t make people hungering wait to watch a video on the wholesomeness of the edible egg.

Folks, your church website isn’t a stinkin’ art project. Nor is it MTV, nor is it a used-car concession. Quit treating like it is with the gratuitous, pretentious Flash introductions.

There are plenty of other legitimate opportunities to employ Flash, putting it at the front door isn’t one of them.

Yes, you click on the small poster to see the full-sized version, but please, no hot-linking without providing a link back here to the article – not just the pix.